DERRING-DO OF THE DEADLY DUDLEYS
The House Of Dudley Joanne Paul Michael Joseph £25 ★★★★☆
For more than 100 years, starting in the late 15th Century, the English throne was occupied by the pragmatic, ruthless, red-headed Tudor family. And standing just behind them, whispering in their ears and nudging them in the ribs, were the Dudleys.
Starting low on the totem pole, this clan of West Midlands gentry managed to rise in royal service by anticipating their masters’ every wish. Sometimes they got it wrong, overreached and found themselves executed on trumped-up charges of treason.
But then the next generation would dust themselves down and start all over again, to the point where it looked as if a Dudley, rather than a Tudor, might actually be the next ruler of England. Not for nothing has the clan been called England’s answer to the Borgias.
When reading Joanne Paul’s lively history of the house of Dudley, it is impossible not to be reminded of
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Just as the novelist used the figure of Thomas Cromwell to get into the engine room of Henry VIII’s gorgeous, brutal reign, so Paul uses the experiences of the Dudleys to light up odd corners and backroom spaces of Tudor palace life.
We follow them, the women as well as the men, into the royal bedchamber, on to the jousting field and into the great feasting halls where mutton, pheasant and quail are glistening and, for after-dinner sport, gentlemen compete to decapitate a live goose most deftly.
Paul starts her story with Edmund Dudley, who served the tightwad Henry VII by screwing the maximum amount of money from his barons. When the King died, imprisonment swiftly followed. Originally, Henry VIII wanted Edmund to be hung, drawn and quartered, but in the end the sentence was commuted to a merciful beheading.
Edmund’s son John was left to start again from scratch, but by dint of becoming an ally of the King’s second wife, the Protestant Anne Boleyn, he managed to scramble up to the position of Duke of Northumberland. In 1549 he became the effective Regent of Britain, ruling on behalf of the sickly 11-year-old Edward VI.
It was at this point that John Dudley got over-confident. With the death of the boy King in 1553, Dudley came up with a plan to make his own daughterin-law, Lady Jane Grey, the next monarch. Inevitably, Mary Tudor, the rightful heir, objected and John Dudley followed his father to a traitor’s grave.
Even this, though, wasn’t enough to keep the family down. When, in the next generation, John Dudley’s son Robert, Earl of Leicester, famously caught Elizabeth I’s fancy and almost became her husband, he sensibly decided that he was safer flirting with England’s virgin Queen than sleeping with her.
When he died – of natural causes – the devastated Queen shut herself up in her bedroom and refused to come out. Robert Dudley had, though, finally broken his family’s curse – he had managed to keep his head.